Native American history from first migrations to today's 574 federally recognized nations — a complete narrative of Indigenous peoples of North America: mound builders, Haudenosaunee democracy, Trail of Tears, boarding schools, Red Power, and tribal sovereignty.In the summer of 1908, a Black cowboy named George McJunkin noticed bones in a washed-out arroyo in New Mexico. Lodged among them was a fluted spear point between the ribs of an extinct bison. He died in 1922 before anyone took him seriously. Five years later, archaeologists confirmed what he understood: humans had hunted here for at least ten thousand years — and sites from Monte Verde to White Sands suggest twenty thousand or more.That deep past is where this narrative history begins. James R. Whitfield traces the full arc from Cahokia — the pre-Columbian city that at its height rivaled London — through the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's federal constitution (some historians date it to 1142), the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Sitting Bull's four years in Canadian exile, the 250-person massacre at Wounded Knee in December 1890, Richard Pratt's Carlisle boarding school with its motto "Kill the Indian, Save the Man," and the American Indian Movement's 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.Inside this Native American history book:The deep precolonial past — Cahokia's Monks Mound, larger in footprint than any Egyptian pyramid; Chaco Canyon's lunar-standstill calendar; Hopewell trade networks from Lake Superior to the Gulf (Chapters 2-3)Haudenosaunee democracy — the Peacemaker's Great Law, five nations bound in a federal confederacy centuries before the U.S. Constitution (Chapter 4)Contact and catastrophe — a 90-percent population collapse within 150 years; disease traveling trade routes before Europeans arrived (Chapters 6-8)Trail of Tears and the wars of the West — Jackson's Removal Act, Sitting Bull's surrender and death at the hands of Lakota police, the Ghost Dance (Chapters 10-13)The boarding-school era — 408 federal schools, 53 burial sites, and intergenerational trauma documented in the 2022 Interior Department report (Chapter 14)Red Power — Alcatraz 1969, the Trail of Broken Treaties, the armed 71-day Wounded Knee siege of 1973 (Chapter 16)The living nations — tribal sovereignty, language immersion schools, and nine million Americans who identify as Native today (Chapters 17-18)No other single-volume narrative covers fifteen thousand years of Indigenous North America — from Ice Age migrants to the self-determination era. The story did not end at Wounded Knee. It is still being written.For readers of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES and Dee Brown's BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE.